Tuesday, 27 April 2010

To find out some other opinions of our film opening to help with our evaluation and contrast to our biased opinions, we decided to show students in our media class our work. A large majority of the feedback was positive, which pleased us. The main points we picked up on were the students noticed the thriller conventions we tried to reflect in our film, such as the lurking point of veiw shot, which the students said builds tension and makes them want to find out more. The students enjoyed our use of sound, which was interesting as we felt we had taken a risk using a more original sound over the montage, compared to the usual fast paced percussive music which may have been used to build tension. The students picked up on the volume and tone of the sound become louder and deeper as the plot builds tension and they enjoyed this. They agreed that the fast pace of the montage and close-up shots also builds suspence, as well as flowing well as a visual peice. Some students however commented that they would have preferred to have seen the faces of the police detectives during the first scene. This made us think about whether we made the right decision to film the lower parts of their bodies. After a discussion within our group we decided that we are glad we filmed it this way, as we wanted to create Anonymity (obviously) and also not focus on the characters too much in the opening, so not all information is given away in the first two minutes of the film.

Thursday, 22 April 2010

Friday, 16 April 2010

Using Final Cut today was much more tricky than usual. We decided that we didn't want to change the end shots of our opening, and there was no correct to have a black screen with "directed by.." on. So we decided that we should have the text over the last shot for one second. We knew we had to import the shot to final cut and apply the text over that instead of a black screen but we didn't know much after that, so we seeked the help of an iMac genius. It literally took all lesson and we finally worked it out a meer ten minutes before the end of the lesson! Very pleased with the results though!

Thursday, 15 April 2010

After taking Nanettes advice for adding more titles, we added in the names of our two actors, using Final Cut again so we could use our chosen font. After watching the opening we today decided that we needed many more. We checked back in our research and realised that we needed titles of-sound, who made it or where did we get it from-costumes and make-up-"written by"- we also realised that the last title of a film opening is always the director

This annoyed us somewhat, as we were happy with the flow of our film and thought that more titles may clutter the montage. We were also very happy with our ending, with the film name title just before the last shot. We therefore had to re-think the placement of all titles.

Although we previously discussed that we didn't want to split mine, jenna, and lewis' names into select roles in the titles as we had all worked equally in editting, filming and planning, we decided that for the aesthetic of the film this needed to be done. We randomly picked the roles, also adding in other names for other film crew titles.We did not however manage to add in "directed by Lewis Ridings", the last title, in time. Tomorrow is the deadline, so we will add this in tomorrows lesson. We are happy with the rest of the opening.

Tuesday, 13 April 2010

Today we gathered two drama students who are used to talking confidently and seriously and recorded them reading the dialogue for our opening. We used the same dialogue that i thought of during storyboarding as it was appropriate and would be the right kind of length. Also during research we found that less dialogue in a thriller opening is more exciting anyway, so we didn't want to waffle on with irrelevant information. We dragged the dialogue onto the correct shots, the timing worked really well and the shots flow well. As Lewis is currently ill, we will have to wait until he gets back to see what he thinks of the dialogue, but as the deadline is nearing we decided to carry on without him, but we are pleased with the quality of the dialogue and the sound is clear.

Monday, 12 April 2010

Today we showed Anonymity to Nanette, our media teacher as it is nearly finished.

Her points were:

- there needs to be more titles

- some of the transitions between shots are messy

- some lovely shots

Fro this, we have drawn the conclusion that we need the actors names (Joe Revill and Matt Price-Williams) during the montage. We also need to re-watch the opening several times very closely listing the shots that are maybe too long or need cutting differently. We are pleased with the "lovely shots" comment as we think that we have thought through a lot of our shots well, particularly the montage shots, using extreme close-ups and panning.